What's It All About Then

What’s it all about then: collecting contemporary international art at Art Gallery of NSW Sydney 1984-2013 and Bath University UK 2013 • The Horton Bequest specified that the income be used to collect non-Australian contemporary art. The Gallery consequently included contemporary galleries on level 2 in the extensions that were opened in 1989. • AGNSW had not previously collected international contemporary so it was necessary to develop a policy or at least a philosophy. • Neither funds nor space permitted a comprehensive representation of art movements or individuals. The collection would start from 1984 rather than attempting a contemporary history from the 1960s nor Avant Garde precursors of the early Twentieth Century. This remains the most serious gap in the collection today. • A framework would be needed to narrow the field and to allow for coherence in both display and interpretation which is essential for a collection to function in the gallery. Identifying ‘the best’ simply would not work without the ‘best of what’ being clarified. • One focus could have been geographical but in the days of global or international avant garde practice this makes very little sense. The frame would have to capture a significant international tendency based on artists’ practice wherever they were working. • The collection should explore key ideas in the recent history of art. The single most important figure in this history would be Marcel Duchamp. The contemporary collection at AGNSW from 1984 • The collection represents a view of what art today can do and why it really matters. • The basic premise is that there is an existential divide between consciousness and matter and that art straddles this boundary. This is particularly powerful when objects come to embody ideas. While this line of argument predates the arrival of internet it provides a platform from which such new technologies have been able to spin off. • We can know about the material world but there is a sense in which being with and of the material world can be wished for but is hard to win outside of meditation. Art does enter this between state, a different kind of knowing. Many major exhibitions and Biennales since the 1960s worked with certain assumptions about art after Duchamp but this has not been well communicated to the public and is little understood even by many art historians. Harald Szeemann was one of the first curators to start mapping the territory through exhibitions such as ‘Live in your head: When attitudes become form’ 1969. It was a landmark exhibition and as the title suggests it investigated the relationship of mind and matter in art. Over the coming decades Szeemann and many other curators continued to ‘show’ these ideas as exhibitions but not necessarily to ‘tell’ what the underlying concepts were that they explored. Szeeman’s exhibition is currently living again as a fairly faithful reconstruction of the 1969 original at Prada Foundation Venice assembled by Germano Celant. The problem with Duchamp as a signpost is that he deliberately wore many hats. One was as a provocateur who found the pretensions of the art market hilarious and never hesitated to send it up. Historians have focussed on his critique of the market overlooking his prodigious investigations of systems of representation including the occult. His objects certainly challenge the very idea of representation and yet simultaneously they provoke a rich tapestry of associations. His unbelievably creative intelligence and sense of humour has opened up vast possibilities for artists in the twentieth century and continues to do so in the present. He was always playfully experimental and built a reputation with very few artworks but came up with some enormously fresh and important ideas. Marcel Duchamp The bride stripped bare by her bachelor’s, even, The Large Glass 1915-1923 The legacy of Marcel Duchamp • In 1915 Marcel Duchamp affirmed that material in art need not be an arbitrary means of creating an image of something external to itself. On the contrary the medium can literally be part of the message. • When Duchamp made the sieves for the Bachelors’ domain instead of painting them he allowed dust to settle on the glass through a mask and later fixed it. Sieves are about collecting particles from a matrix and it takes time so the process of accumulating dust corresponds perfectly with the meaning of the objects portrayed. • This idea of Duchamp’s could be summarised as employing an ‘ontological communion’ between signifier and signified. In other words a thing could be represented by a trace of itself or by a part that signified the whole or just by a material affiliation with the thing. It was to liberate art from the limitation of pictorial illustration for coming generations while reintroducing the possibility of referencing sensory experience of the world denied by abstraction. • Duchamp was also interested in arcane systems such as alchemy, cabala, numerology. These systems fascinated him for their complexity but he also saw how they could provide templates for introducing and ordering chance in art. • The importance of chance was to be critical in the avant garde for example for John Cage and Samuel Beckett as well as for minimalism and conceptual art including systems and process art in the 1960s and 1970s. Chance and systems are a way to avoid self expression by an artist and make the encounter of a viewer and an object the site of expression. Francis Bacon was very aware of this and played it for all it was worth Key works from the British Show 1985 At the same time as I was working through the implications of such a policy I was also curating an exhibition of new British art that toured Australia and NZ in 1985. Some of the artists I worked with in that exhibition fed into the concepts that would subsequently guide the formation of the collection: These included the place of art in mediating mind and matter, metaphors of the horizon and the void. ‘ontological communion’, metonymy (where a fragment or trace of an object might stand for the whole) and objects that precipitate embodied memory. Subsequent exhibitions I curated also fed into this developing model for looking at art. For example Boundary Rider, Body, Trace, Self Portraits, Kiefer, and even Bacon. Antony Gormley – Work 1984 These lead figures were made by covering a cast of his own body they take the form of traces like cicada shells hence Stephen Bann suggests they are not images of him but traces or in ‘ontological communion’ with his absent body. Antony Gormley - A Field for the Art Gallery of New South Wales 1989 The first of his fields series. These figures configured in the shape of the brain suggest consciousness arising from the earth. This idea about mind and matter in art came to be central to my thinking about the collection and art in general. Gormley at Mootwingie Courbet L’Origine du monde Gormley Field for great Australian desert Antony Gormley at Mootwingie discovering the source of the Mootwingee creek or L’origine du monde, another kind of metaphorical threshold to the void or event horizon the meeting of being and not being ie the point of becoming where life bringing water bubbles up from the rock. Antony Gormley A room for the great Australian desert 1989 AGNSW. While installing A room.. and collecting red dirt to make Field for AGNSW, Gormley talked about Heidegger and the horizon that marks the limits of perception and metaphorically separates consciousness and materiality. In this place when you stand up you are the highest point this side of the horizon. It is a vertiginous experience of being between heaven and earth yet not wholly of either. Anish Kapoor encounters a wild void. Void Field Blackness from her womb. In 1989 I returned to the same area with Anish Kapoor where we encountered a naturally occurring, void that had been deliberately worked on by Indigenous people 20,000 years ago suggesting a womb. The void and the horizon share the symbolism of the limit of human perception or consciousness where it ‘touches’ the material plane. The void has Gnostic connotations and in this case it suggests a potentiality such as that which produced the big bang rather than an absence. Bob Law Blue black Indigo Black 1977 Also in the British Show Bob Law has referenced the void or ‘space for zen mediation’ This work functions optically like a window onto the infinite. There are 12 layers of paint under this black each seamlessly laid down, dried for three days and over painted to create this visual effect of infinity. It takes a few moments looking before the layers of blue and indigo within the field appear creating this sensation of deep space. Steve Willats ‘Pat Purdy and the glue sniffer’s camp’ 1981. Here the boundary between the urban planner’s determined housing estate and the anarchic waste land colonised by the youth of the estate was marked by a cyclone wire fence. Objects found by a hole in the fence have been attached to the image. This glue can for example changes its function and meaning when it passes through the fence. From the culture of stable attachment it becomes a source of ritual dysfunction. Here the fence functions as a veil or horizon between control and chaos / consciousness and unconsciousness. Tony Cragg - Spirogyra 1992 Spirogyra captures the idea of dna assembling random (molecules) bottles into a partially determined structure. Again it juxtaposes chaos and order. It is also a visual reference to Duchamp and his readymade Egoutoire or bottle rack Tony Cragg tells a very poignant story about taking a pencil and paper and trying to draw or for that matter write something.

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